SEKONYER RIVERby Karen Harrison

There are three main branches in Karen Harrison’s poetry – mythological interpretation, journeying and intimate experiences. These sometimes intertwine, sometimes stay parallel. And the crown is full of movement with falling leaves at the edge of summer (her primordial sorrow) and elegant trembling of language. The movement is often a pulse. Some poems maintain their distance, others crush you with their closeness. But this is not a feminine poetry of attraction and sentiment, anticipating and inducing, it is a traveller’s poetry in which the poet floats free with her images and readers solely dependent on the river’s currents. A confirmation of Heraclitus’ ‘Everything is one’. Where rivers are trees from above.

Sekonyer River

We sit on the raft between the boats where the men wash themselves and their clothes in a lather of suds and shouting. Scrubbing and dousing: skin soap water skin, white on brown, brown on white, clothes pasted on the deck.

We are Boulés – a peripheral people. It’s hot: the sweat buds on my skin, blisters and rolls along my limbs. Clothes and wood, I am only one. Everything is wet under the dry sun. I jump, gasping and bleeding sweat into the brown river, licking blood from fingers that should have been kept otherwise dry for fear of infection in the teeming water. I swim out from the bank, cloudy with slops and soap, into the racing current of the brown stream.

Cassandra

I no longer try to tell them that the walls will fall and the smoke will rise. Rising even through the shouting and the sounds of deaths and the ends of lives. Hoarse and twisting from the temples and our choking streets, screaming at the gods in heaven, just to make them pause, just to sting their eyes who once watched over us.

I will raise the special keening of a promise kept and a curse fulfilled. Through them all I know he hears me and in marking me knows it marks me still: his unspeaking, blinding presence in that silent cave on that quiet hill. Silent in his majesty who is God of words and the marksman’s kill, in stillness watching me.

With his mouth he sealed my eyes and I saw. Shining as he kissed my throat and I spoke. Through his touch I felt him smile like a boy: easing his divinity in touching my mortality, an exchange of gifts.

Never did he take from me what he’d changed. Subtler to change the world, not to heed. Till I choked on bloodied words and grew dumb, left them whole inside of me. Such elegance of cruelty is what marks the gods.

Yet the choice was mine and the gifts remain and I will not trade.

The Traveller and the Sea

I met a traveller, a long man with long strides, who shared some time and coffee with me and talked to me about the sea.

He told me he had found his voice in the ocean, in the small, coloured whispers of the small, coloured fishes who live and die in the coral and make no great journeys.

He told me that he knew of the memory of rivers, of the places where crying has swollen the groundwater, so all who drink are reminded of the taste of sorrows.

He told me that he knew of a sea of forgetfulness where the water is sweet on the white, desperate shore. It rings with echoes of friendship and the noise carries far.

And I thought perhaps I haven’t travelled far enough to have won the water’s stories for my own or perhaps he is still journeying and not yet come to solid ground.

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